


Summer Lovin'

by Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer



Category: Snowbarry - Fandom, The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: AU, Alternate Scene, Angst, F/M, One Shot, SnowBarry ff, Spiraling, drunk, drunkAU!Barry, mirror situation, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:57:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer/pseuds/Savy_tries_to_be_a_writer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Summerdays, drifting away for oh – oh come on, Caitlin, you know this one!”</p><p>It was like a big musical entrance. The front door had slammed open and a tall, slender figure had taken a wide step over its threshold, one arm swinging theatrically up towards the ceiling, singing loudly. The only thing missing was confetti flying out of his lifted hand, really. He hadn’t even missed a single note.</p><p>“How can you sing perfectly even when you’re drunk off your marbles, Barry?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Lovin'

**Author's Note:**

> this was an ask/a prompt from someone on tumblr, and I wrote it up between 1 and 3 am lying in bed, so be nice. Also I suck at bio-chemistry, which no one regrets more than I do, so I do apologize for inaccuracies.

“Summerdays, drifting away for oh – oh come on, Caitlin,  _you know this one_!”

It was like a big musical entrance. The front door had slammed open and a tall, slender figure had taken a wide step over its threshold, one arm swinging theatrically up towards the ceiling, singing loudly. The only thing missing was confetti flying out of his lifted hand, really. He hadn’t even missed a single note.

“How can you sing perfectly even when you’re  _drunk off your marbles_ , Barry?” Looking from the outside, there was no one around him that the female voice could have come from. The theatrics distracted from the smaller figure, covered in a coat that exposed slim calves in stockings that ended in a pair of dark green pumps. The woman was locked in a neck hold by the tall, drunk and singing man. She was holding on to his wrist and bracing his back, guiding him towards the stairs four feet from the door she had just fumbled around on for five minutes trying to unlock. In the dark, the damn key kept slipping off its intended hole, and Barry had tried to shove her away from it once or twice to ‘ _hyper-vibrate the lock out_ ’.  _No, no, I can_ totally  _do this_ , he had said, stretching his hand out in front of him and missing the doorknob on every try to steady himself on it. Caitlin had finally managed to lean him against the door frame and get the key in to unlock it. It had been a challenge.

Towering over his supporting companion, drunk-as-a-skunk Barry swayed from the set-in closets by the door to the couch on the other side of the room. Caitlin draped his arms over the railings of the stairs, turned around and locked the door again. “Gooood thinkening, Caylin, mh” Barry slurred, surveying her every move before getting distracted by the way the moonlight hit his favourite throw-pillow on the couch.

“Hey where did that come from?” he asked into the room.

Caitlin returned to his side and put his arm back around her shoulders. “Let’s get you into bed, huh?” she said enthusiastically, the smile dying from her lips when she realized she would have to climb the stairs with Barry’s weight on top of hers. And he wouldn’t be able to cooperate at all, most likely. Oh boy. And wait, where was Barry’s bedroom anyway? What if she walked into Joe’s room by accident?

“Hey Barry?” she asked tentatively. “Yeah!” he replied chipper as ever, his eyes going a little cross as he turned his head away from the window at the top of the stairs towards her face. “You have pity, I mean pwetty,  _pretty_ eyes” he finally got out. Caitlin felt her heart beat a little faster. She thanked whatever good luck she had that it was dark inside and Barry couldn’t see the blood rushing to her cheeks.

“Wait, were you going to say something?” he asked, crunching his eyebrows together and squinting to the top of the stairs. He could see it all right, but he felt that if he kept his eyes fully open, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate well on his thoughts. And he was intent on keeping his secrets to himself.  _Especially_ in front of Caitlin.

The brunette snapped back into reality and shook her head to get rid of any fluttering feelings Barry’s words had left in her mind and stomach. “Right,” she said, remembering her plan, “okay, Barry, I need you to focus for a second. Can you run us up to your bedroom real quick?” She moved her hand from his wrist to his chest, keeping him from keeling over. But the way the soft fabric of his jumper felt against her fingertips, she wished she didn’t have to let go. Straightening himself up again, Barry’s cheeks seemed to grow as the corners of his mouth tried to push themselves towards his eyes. The arm he had draped over Caitlin’s shoulder slid down to her waist and he pulled her tightly into his side. “You want to see my posters?” he asked cheekily, lifted her two inches off the floor and ran both of them upstairs into his room.

 _He doesn’t ’flash’ as fast as he usually does_ , Caitlin noticed. Logical, really, him being intoxicated and all. Alcohol made  _normal_ people move and react slower, of course it did Barry too. To a certain extend.

“Well done,” she said to him with a pat on his chest. Barry smiled proudly to himself. _Goofy little boy_ , ran across her mind,  _I cannot believe it actually worked_. As she pushed him back gently towards his bed, someone cleared their throat by the door. Caitlin turned her head and Barry’s arm shot up in an exaggerated wave “Joe! Oh crap, are you okay?” He had smacked Caitlin on her head with his greeting.

“Yeah I’m fine, and this is  _not_ what it looks like” she was quick to reassure the sudden bystander, but really, she knew she wished it  _was_. But taking all the confusion and complication of the past months, in Joe and Barry’s case more like  _years_ , Caitlin thought it wiser not to let Joe know or even suspect that.

“ _What_ is going on with Barry?” Joe asked her out of the side of his mouth, simply ignoring Barry’s babbling noises as he sat down on the edge of his bed and fell backwards, arms extended away from his torso.

“We… we tested a little something on Barry tonight.” Caitlin rubbed the palms of her hands together nervously. It’s never fun to tell a parent you got their child drunk, even if said child wanted you to and was old enough to drink. “Tested  _what_ exactly?” Joe took a step closer towards the two of them, which didn’t help her calm down at all. “Well, see, because of his sped up metabolism, Barry isn’t really affected by alcohol? His system pretty much just burns it off instantly.  _So_ , Cisco and I had an idea, that for alcohol to have an effect on Barry,” the man in question currently rolled across the length of his bed exclaiming ‘ _this carrousel ride is way too dark, I can’t see my pony_ ’, “it would have to be administered in a high dosage over an extended period of time. So we crafted together a little pill, you see.”

Joe raised his eyebrows. “You  _drugged_  him?” Concern weighed heavy in his tone, and Caitlin took a step back.

“No, well,  _yes_ , but you see, it was designed to work a little bit like an antihistamine you know? Meaning he would get more and more of a certain distillate in his system over a period of, in our case, an hour. He would burn it all off within 90 minutes and be normal Barry again, without a hangover or anything.”  _Lucky bastard_ , she added in his mind, remembering with a twinge in her stomach how  _her_ last hangover went down.

“Well, how long ago did you give him that pill then? It’s 2 am.”

“About 3 hours ago?” Caitlin’s face turned into an apologetic mass of beautifully scrunched up cheeks and lips, the palms of her hands red from the nervous rubbing and picking she did on them. Joe stood still, surveyed Barry for a minute and then turned back to Caitlin.

“Are you going to make sure he’s alright?” he asked. Caitlin moved her gaze from Joe to Barry. Really, she couldn’t blame him for asking the question. Barry had taken off his jumper and thrown it on the floor, was currently lying on his back and tying his shoelaces together instead of taking the shoes off. He sang ‘Summer Nights’ in two different voices. Every time the ‘oh well, oh well, oh well, oh hm’ part came up, he swung his legs from side to side. Caitlin could barely repress a laugh. To hide her adoring smile, she covered her mouth with her hand.

“Yes, of course, I’ll make sure he’s alright.” She somehow forced out. Joe turned and raised a hand in good-bye. “Good night, then” he said, closing the door behind him. Caitlin removed her hand and showed a look of delight that caught Barry’s eye. He let go of his shoelaces and stared at her with an open mouth.

 _She looks so beautiful_ , he thought to himself.

Caitlin kneeled on the bed next to him now, taking off one shoe after the other. “You, mister, are in big trouble if you don’t get to sleep soon.” The corners of her mouth were still turned upwards, and the light in her eyes seemed to illuminate the slight pink colour of her cheeks.

“Tell me about it,” Barry mumbled more to himself than her, and as his heartbeat stopped pacing itself and took up speed again. Oddly, it seemed to calm him down instead of make him more busy. Caitlin’s hands moved to his collar and he registered how she began to carefully unbutton his shirt. She was careful not to move the parting of his shirt to the side, so she wouldn’t expose his chest. It was not her place. It was not the time. It was not her right. But he needed to put on a t-shirt or he would be uncomfortable because of poking buttons during the night. Arriving at the last button, she pondered quickly whether to take his pants off, too.

 _No_ , she said to herself, _he can be uncomfortable for a night then, too awkward_. She reached across Barry, who was lying completely still by this point, and grabbed a t-shirt from the side of his bed. “Okay, I’m going to try to get you into this now, ok?” She half asked him, and he sat up straight and shook off his shirt. Caitlin tried to focus on holding the t-shirt so it would go over his head and torso in one motion, desperate not to be tempted to peek. As she stretched the hole for his head a little bit, he pushed through it gently, and the t-shirt was on in a matter of seconds. Caitlin exhaled loudly, a mixture of relief and disappointment. Her gaze fell steadily from Barry’s eyes to his mouth, across his t-shirt to his jeans. They really  _weren’t_ proper sleeping attire.  _Grow up Caitlin, and just get his pyjamas on_ , she thought to herself.

“Do you want to keep the jeans on, or take them off?” the brunette asked coy, biting the corner of her lower lip as she did. Barry looked at her with an odd expression. He didn’t really show  _any_ emotion on his face right now. His eyebrows were pulled together a bit, his eyelids tight around the corners. He seemed to be in deep thought, a bit mad perhaps.

“What?” Caitlin asked, a bit unsettled by his expression. “Something wrong?”

 _Everything. Everything is wrong. Why are you here with me? What happened after you gave me that pill? Did I do something to you? Did I let it show? Did it slip, do you know of my secret? Do you know how I feel about you?_  He suddenly remembered why he didn’t get drunk a lot during and after his college years, and it was because he  _never remembered_. _Another thing the metahuman-ness didn’t take away from me_ , he thought to himself. He remembered Caitlin and Cisco beaming at him as he was trying to leave the lab earlier that evening. They had come up with some sort of pill that would allow him to get drunk? But after taking the pill with a shot of tequila and following it with two shots of vodka, his memory was a blank. He didn’t remember how he got to his room. And he was angry at himself for asking for this. Their friendship was too valuable to him to make it awkward with something he let slip while he was drunk.

“Off, I wanna take them off.” Barry suddenly replied, an undertone of frustration in his voice. “Okay…” she was now mere inches away from him, a bit shocked as he started to undo the button and fly on his jeans. As if suddenly realizing that she was watching him, Caitlin turned her face which gained in colour away, and at the same time Barry shot into a flash. He took off his jeans, put on pyjama pants and was under the cover by the time Caitlin turned back to see where the sudden gush of air came from. Seeing him there, looking at her with that strange expression, she couldn’t help but feel nervous. Had she done something wrong? Had she gone too far in undoing his buttons? Was he mad at her for getting him drunk?

“What is it?” she asked him. Caitlin hoped that he was still drunk enough not to hear the shaking of her voice in that question. Barry kept looking at her, not moving besides closing and opening his eyes every now and then. He didn’t respond.

“Barry?” Caitlin reached out to touch his leg, and Barry’s hand raced to hers. He held it tightly, urgently almost. He didn’t know what to do. He was feeling frustrated with himself, scared of what he may have said and how Caitlin would feel about what he possibly could have said, and he felt sad.

The hangover did catch him in the end it seemed, just lighter than it would a normal human. Barry longed for a hug, comfort. And Caitlin was his weakness. She didn’t dare to ask him again, instead she just scooted closer to him and cupped his face with her free hand. Her eyes searched for a reply, an answer to her unspoken question, in his. But the response came to the hand that was glued to his soft and slightly stubbled cheek, when something seemed to glide past her index finger. Something  _wet_. Instinctively her other hand went to brace the other half of his face, and she moved her body even closer to his. She didn’t ask him for a reason. She didn’t need one.

“I  _really_ don’t like being drunk,” Barry whispered hoarsely after a few minutes. “It always leaves me feeling empty. I don’t remember anything. Did I do something?”

“Oh, Barry…” Caitlin sighed, and she let go of his face. She pulled the covers away and laid down next to him, an arm extended for him to slip under and tuck his head in the space between her neck and shoulder. Without necessary explanations, he did so and snuggled up to her side. She laced his hair between her fingers, and rubbed his back with her other hand.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said soothingly. “You’re going to be fine. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll make sure you’re okay” she said, and planted a kiss on top of his head. Barry closed his eyes and let the steady breathing of the woman he loved weigh him to sleep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> shout out to my comment section and ask box on tumblr.  
> I encourage comments, tipps, questions, anything to improve my writing abilities!  
> Have a lovely one, folks!


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